Issue 1

<div class="page old_photo"> <article> <header style="background-image:url(/uploads/52954b0512da2.JPG);"> <div class="box"> <div class="intro"> <h1>J-a-z-z</h1> AK Lamm </div> </div> </header> <div class="main"> <div class="container"> A piece of fiction July: Mid-summer. The humidity hangs thick in the night air, a last bastion to the setting, beating sun that has plagued the city for a week. A feeble breeze fights to break up the monotony to the day’s record-breaking temperature. They call Canada the Great White North but the girls strolling the streets in white bikinis make it feel like an evening in Cancun. Their stomachs spill over shorts that would be too small for a toddler and stumble in high heels with their tree trunk legs.hey carry stacks of flashy cards in their hands, approaching dazed pedestrians like me. One corners me and I have no escape plan. “$2 drinks till midnight!” She squeals. I look at her dumbfounded. “First one’s on the house!” Her makeup crawls up to her eyebrows, bright blue and covered in silver sparkles under dry skin slathered in self tanner and cover up to hide gangrenous spots from too many nights of drinking. She looks like a primed peacock plucked from some promised paradise. Maybe I have been transported to some seaside resort. A haven of inclusive prices, piles of food, bottomless drinks, and hours of mindless melanoma lounging in a twenty foot steel cage. That's it. I've died and gone to hell.“ Do you want it or what?” She demands, shoving the ticket into my hand. I can’t help but notice her claw-like fingernails curving into tiny rainbows of psychedelic colours. I’ve always had an innate fear of birds and struggle to respond.She lets go of the ticket when it’s good and shoved into my clammy fist. “Weirdo,” she mumbles underneath her breath. A group of men behind me whistle at her. She waves at them and sashays forward. I take the crumpled palm tree voucher and bury it deep in my pocket along with my tourist trap anxiety. I can see the small bar I’m headed towards attached to a historic hotel now converted into dilapidated student apartments. It’s a Tuesday. I opt for trivia. Two tungsten bulbs haphazardly illuminate a faded name in wonky blue block writing for passersby. You know it and you’ll find it if you are looking for it. Its retro Shure shaped ‘I’ is like a beacon for some throwback generation whose proto-70’s reincarnation is a jigsaw of cultural memory tarnished by a new age nihilism. Can you blame them? These teenagers who grew up buying anti-establishment merchandise, whose DIY beginnings is that missing corner piece lost in the puzzle of historical meaning.But in that name and in that image there are these hungry children who grew out of an age without answers struggling to thrive on force-fed rhetoric, who seem to have found something in the warble of: “Zed, zed, zee, zee, J-a-z-ed, zed, zee, zee, zee, J-a-zed J-a-z-ed, zed, J-a-z-ed...” And that’s the letterhead to those rebels who are overwhelmed with all the causes so they flock to that sign: “The Jimmy Jazz.” But they just call it the Jazz. Upon entrance the place looks sordid. The navy blue walls chipped and cracked, a single painting of Che Guevara decorated in tacky red Christmas lights overlooks the place.Numerous carved names and phrases adorn the tabletops.Everything that is upholstered is now cracked and faded. The bathrooms are covered with graffiti philosophy offering advice for broken hearts and drunks with guilty consciences.The place looks sleazy yet I have a sneaking suspicion that the decision to keep it this way is purposeful. It’s the most effective deterrent against hordes of newly minted 19 year olds shuddering with excitement to burn holes in their wallets and brains. Once a night a group of them will stumble in slick with sweat from the sex imbued garbage still reverberating in their ears. Dazed and confused, the girls flock together hiding their nerves behind high pitched giggles while the boys flex their steroid infused muscles. Their joints straining and expanding beyond their maximum genetic potential to create engorged slabs of meat that look like they were poorly transfused by a deranged doctor. Like animals, they smell a foreign territory and slowly back out, breaking eye contact just as the doors close behind them dissipating the smell of their cheap experience. While bright eyes watch their entrance and exit they search for new friends and lovers with the same innate desire to hunt and gather for meaning in a tumbledown bar. These eyes that watch the door are set in shaggy heads whose hair is sculpted into post-modern punk statements popping out of plaid shirts, jean jackets, and hoodeds weatshirts and spilling out over tight pants whose deteriorated state is the envy of all swiss cheese. This baris the Island of Misfit Toys whose nightly inhabitants aredefective only because their version of fun is a continuoussearch for meaning no -ism can fulfill and the bottom of apint glass understands. I arrive at 9:45 pm. Early. The eyes have not yet arrived. Trivia starts at 10:00, which usually means 10:45.I grab a seat and wait for the rest of my team. The bar is almost empty, except for the bartender and one more soul who occupies a bar stool across from my booth. The select lights running across the bar wood show a spiderweb of features betraying a woman in her late thirties.She wears a tight t-shirt with a faded cartoon whose purpose reaches beyond my cultural understanding. A gap of flesh charred by years of reckless sun exposure is cut into at the hip by skimpy blue jeans paired with brown cowboy boots.look out of sorts, a lost cowgirl whose ranch is down the street blaring Top 40 Country hits housing a stable of bucking mechanical bulls who feed the sexually intoxicated.Yet it's not her appearance that has caught my fascination but the peculiar position she has remained in since I took my seat. One elbow rests against the bar wood holding a crisp five dollar bill straight up in the air. She could be a wax sculpture other than the clockwork rhythmic sway that occurs every time she takes a sip from her drink. The bartender watches her methodically, drying hot steaming pint glasses straight from the washing machine. Droplets of water still desperately cling onto the surface despite the 'Heated Dry'application washing machines come equipped with. The meditative atmosphere is broken as she hits the bottom of her drink. Ice clatters in the glass as she desperately sucks up the remaining liquid through the straw.The alcohol now seeps into her bloodstream whose full effect will be felt in twenty minutes. Her last train of thought barrels through a closing tunnel of clarity as she looks up at the bartender for the first time since my arrival. She leans over the counter the lone bill still clasped in her hand, a standing soldier of commerce whose entire purpose of existence is to be exchanged. A purpose she decides as God and General this soldier will not fulfill because in this moment as the bartender and I watch transfixed she grasps the note in both hands and tears him into tiny pieces. With a grand motion she casts the remains off the counter sending the purposeless pieces of paper flying around the bar. “Where?” Her voice trails off. She clears her throat, reaches out and firmly grasps the sleeve of the paralyzed bartender.And we listen: “Where have all the good men gone?” A moment passes and there is no answer. There is no answer because the moment is broken by what could only be described as a gaggle of geese entering the bar and squawking in my direction. My friends bring me back to the reality of sweat running down my back and pooling in the sticky flesh where the femur meets the fibula. The doors are now revolving as flashing eyes pool into their second home hungrily feeding on familiar faces to validate their own. In the moments that continue to build from the first interruption she disappears from my view piece by piece in the same way as children race to build towering Duplo blockwalls. In that myriad of earthy tone, touched by pastels, or abrasive patterns she recedes. I do too. My mind wandering off with her for I also hunger for an answer to her question. So I spend my evening wondering, participating in conversation by nodding, and recording answers to keep the free beer coming. And tonight the bottom of my pint glasses will give me one answer: They’re chasing girls in white bikinis selling free drinks and the promise of laughter. </div> </div> </article> </div>

Share

Issue 1